In this course, we dive into the topic of child development. You will learn that child development is complex and is influenced by a surprisingly rich number of factors at many different levels of organization. You will see that development can be studied in various domains and at various levels of understanding, from different angles and disciplines. Importantly, you will come to understand that processes within and between the various domains and levels of organization continuously interact to shape development. This implies that understanding development requires taking an interdisciplinary approach.
In order to help you organize your thinking about this complexity you will learn more about the developmental systems approach and theories related to that. We will look, amongst other things, at the brain and motor development, cognitive, language and social-emotional development and all the factors that have an influence on development.
To illustrate how an interdisciplinary approach helps to understand child development you will see how researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds study child development at Utrecht University. These scientists will give a look in their field of knowledge and their collaboration with colleagues, to illustrate how the theory you will learn translates to practice.
In sum, we invite you to follow us on a journey to understand child development from synapse to society!

Reviews

TA

Present world is competitive. People don not have time to think about children. This is mostly time demanded to me. I am thankful to be a part of it...

RR

May 13, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to this course. It was very well designed and it was informative in easy way..

From the lesson

Cognitive development

This week we will focus on cognitive development and how this affects how children think and act. You will see that information from the previous week, in which we discussed the development of the brain and motor skills, can be used to understand cognitive development.

Taught By

dr. Jorg Huijding

Transcript

One of the reasons why we study rats is that we're interested in the benefits of play for animal development in general. Of course, one of the main outlooks is that we want to understand what the functions and the benefits are of playing with other children for human development. And the benefits of using an animal model for that is that we have a lot of control over the conditions under which these animals grow up and function and that we can manipulate and study certain aspects of behavior in isolation whereas that is not possible in humans where, you know, a child grows up in his own social and societal context which of course adds a complexity that you cannot study in an animal model. So ideally, we would like to do both. Well, the interesting thing about this research I think is that it is in principle it is fundamental. It is trying to relate brain function to behavior, trying to relate, you know, a behavioral aberrations to aberrant brain function. However, the outlook can be very applied because there's a lot of interest also in society, in this country and the Western world in general in play of children and why it is important. So from that point of view, I think we can use the results of our work as a guidance even for policymakers or people who are in an educational policy for example, how play can be used to stimulate child development. And it's interesting structure to begin with. Yeah. And because all the... One of the main goals of all research that is ongoing in the Utrecht University's strategic theme, Dynamics of Youth, is to understand the factors that contributes development of children to grow up into balanced, responsible, happy healthy adults and we think that social play is a very important behavior that facilitates that optimal development. Our collaboration dates back from four years now and it has been quite fruitful from the beginning. So right now actually, we do have a synoptic correlate of what might be wrong in the brain of an animal that we have deprived of the opportunity to play with all the rats when the animal was young. So we do find that in structure of the brain called the prefrontal cortex which is important for cognition and cognitive development, there's something wrong with the balance between excitation and inhibition, the way these cells are being steered into guiding activity in other brain regions.

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